At Colette, a Line of T-shirts and Toys for All Ages

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Several of the items on offer from the artist Oliver Jeffers’s limited-edition line for Colette include (clockwise from top left) a set of “before and after” mugs, a sweatshirt for adults, a child’s shirt with an all-over design of Jeffers’s drawings and pins.CreditMalcolm Brown

By Hilary Moss

Dec. 5, 2016

In Oliver Jeffers’s 2014 book “Once Upon the Alphabet,” “A” isn’t for “apple” nor “aardvark,” but instead for an astronaut named Edmund, who had “been training to go on an adventure up into space to meet some aliens.” The assonant tale of Edmund’s acrophobia pans out in a few pages, before it’s on to “B: Burning a Bridge,” a brief history of the embattled neighbors Bernard and Bob. “My sketchbooks are filled with little ideas, and this is an amalgamation of 26 of them, each represented by one letter of the alphabet,” Jeffers says of the best seller. “The stories individually wouldn’t have worked as full picture books, but when combined create a whole.”

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Oliver Jeffers at Colette.CreditMartina Maffini

Two years later, the Irish-bred and now Brooklyn-based artist has turned the scenes into a limited-edition product line (as well as a sweeping installation of murals and felt furniture) for the Parisian store Colette. “I wanted to actually design, and not just lend my art to, something,” Jeffers says, “and everything had to be ethically manufactured, with a degree of social consciousness.” To that end, he will donate a portion of the sales to the International Rescue Committee.

The collection includes sweatshirts and tees with letter prints, vinyl toys, original drawings, sculptures, a set of mugs and other miscellaneous items; however, Jeffers points out that, apart from the clothing (either kid- or adult-size), he doesn’t indicate how old his customer should be, much like he doesn’t presume the age of his readership. “Some people might think that the cups are small so they’ll be more suitable for children, and, yes, that’s a byproduct, but they’re that small because they’re the size of the cup of coffee I like to have,” he says. “They were designed as such because it suits the way in which I see the world. Everything flowed from that.”

$48-$150 for apparel, $22-$150 for collectibles and $1,800-$2,500 for original artworks; colette.fr.